It was discovered recently that the "McCain family Recipes" posted on the McCain website were in fact lifted verbatim from the food network. A tempest in a teapot for sure, but in the aftermath of the flap, a staffer was fired for doing this. Clearly, John and Cindy McCain knew from the start that these were not family recipes because they did not provide them to the staffer in question. So they knew, assuming that they had knowledge of their own web site that the whole thing was a lie to begin with. It is clear that in Washington and in the broader American culture, lying is the business of the day. There is in the whole culture a confusion of truth with PR. The media culture that has honed the art of creating illusion is in fact a culture of lying. Truth has nothing to do with it.
The recent media flap about Hillary and Bill's lie about the events surrounding Hillary's trip to Bosnia underscores again, the pervasiveness of the Culture of Lying. In an AP news article, the headline is "Clinton misstates wife's Bosnia Tale". Note the word "misstates". They didn't say lie. Look around and see how often the word "lie" is used in the media. People "misstate" things, they even "misspeak" at times. They never lie. The word "lie" has been effectively expunged from the national vocabulary. If there is no word for an untruth, there are no untruths and if there are no untruths, there are no truths. It is all a game to see whose propaganda is more effective. The truth is what you can get away with. No wonder the American people have lost their way. We have a culture of national secrecy so extreme, that even the people elected to represent us really have no idea what is really going on. To conceal their own inability to find the truth, they perpetuate the culture of lying.